Windows Thin PC: Another flavor of Windows 7

As I discovered in recent TechEd presentations in Australia and New Zealand, not too many people are familiar with the newest members of the Windows 7 family. So let’s explore one of those in more detail, called Windows Thin PC. For the full marketing overview, you can review these pages:

To summarize, Windows Thin PC is a modified version of Windows 7 (built from a Windows Embedded Standard 7 base) that is available as a Software Assurance benefit (for anyone with Software Assurance on their desktop operating systems). It has a reduced footprint (1.1GB compressed WIM, under 5GB when expanded on disk), and as a result has lighter hardware requirements:

1GHz processor

1GB RAM

16GB hard disk space

So it should come as no surprise that it is designed to be used as a thin client OS, enabling older or lesser hardware to connect to your VDI or terminal services infrastructure to run most applications.

Windows Thin PC has licensing restrictions that allows very few applications to be installed and used locally. From the Thin PC FAQ:

Can I run applications on WinTPC?

Yes, you can run applications that fall into one of the following categories:

Security

Management

Terminal emulation

Remote Desktop and similar technologies

Web browser

Media player

Instant messaging client

Document viewers

.NET Framework and Java Virtual Machine

However, you cannot run any productivity applications, such as Microsoft Office or similar applications.

Again, this is pretty consistent with what you could do with dedicated thin client hardware,

So what is it like to deploy this operating system? It deploys just like any other version (SKU) of Windows 7. MDT 2012 will officially support deploying this OS (since that where we’ve done all of our testing), but it’s not hard to get MDT 2010 Update 1 to deploy it too by removing the <UpgradeData> section from the unattend.xml that you use to deploy Windows Thin PC.

What does it look like once installed? Just like Windows 7, but with fewer items on the start menu:

So it’s not an operating system for everyone, but it does have its place.

I think it's really sad that SA license is mandatory for this product. Would be great for all our smaller customers with old hardware who don't have SA but still want to replace those old Windows XP which they more or less only use for RDS/Citrix.

I've spent about 2 days trying to get WinTPC deployed via MDT 2010, and I've just not had much luck (catalog errors when trying to generate the task sequence). I'm going to go back to the win7 client for now but do you know of any where that clearly outlines how to get winTPC working with MDT 2010?

FYI – we’ve just spent a few hours trying to get this version of Windows to pull in RemoteApps from a feed, but it crashes out with an error. It’s been a known issue for at least 2 years, and at least one forum thread about it has had no update since then.